KEY POINTS:
The outcomes of two international meetings next month may determine whether the Kyoto Protocol lasts even one full year into its five-year commitment period that starts in January.
The first is the Apec summit of Asia-Pacific leaders to be held in Sydney, at which climate change is expected to be top of the agenda.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who will chair the forum, has asked his Apec counterparts to consider how the 21 member countries can support an "emerging practical consensus on a global framework for tackling climate change".
Apec includes the world's two largest greenhouse gas emitters - the United States and China - and Howard has proposed a model in which countries set their own objectives in a range of areas which affect climate change, rather than compulsory targets.
Greenpeace has made public details of a leaked Apec draft communique suggested by the US. The draft does not mention targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but instead proposes solutions based entirely on "new clean technologies" rather than on changes in the way people lead their lives.
The second meeting, in Washington on September 27 and 28, involves the countries that are the major emitters of greenhouse gases.
The object of the meeting is to extend the goals for reducing emissions. It will take place just a few days after a United Nations meeting on September 24 to discuss climate change. That meeting will also develop a new agreement on greenhouse gas limits to take effect when the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012.
Environmental groups have called this planned meeting - proposed by US President George Bush in May - a diversion from other international efforts to address global warming and climate change. But the White House says the meeting will complement the one at the UN.
The countries which have been invited to the Washington meeting are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and South Korea. Bush has also invited a delegation from Europe, and representatives from the UN. New Zealand, which produces only 0.14 per cent of the world's anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions is nowhere near a big enough player to be invited.
Bush has said he wants to take a leadership role in tackling climate change, with a strategy based on new technologies but without setting caps on emissions by various countries. He proposes that the major emitters should draw up a framework on climate change that goes beyond the Kyoto Protocol's commitment period.
His proposal would require countries to set "mid-term goals that reflect their own mix of energy sources and future energy needs".
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host the talks in Washington and Bush will address the meeting.
On the invitation to attend, he has said that the US is committed to collaborating with other major economies to agree on a detailed contribution for a new global framework by the end of next year, which would contribute to a global agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change by 2009.
The Kyoto Protocol is the present global agreement under this framework.
What is not yet clear is whether the new global agreement would be in addition to Kyoto or a replacement. And it is not clear whether it would come into effect in 2009 or 2012.
Although it is under the auspices of the UN, the Kyoto Protocol is becoming very much a Europe-centred agreement, with other players - including New Zealand - tagging along.
Of the non-European members of Kyoto, Canada has already made it clear that it is not going to be able to meet its Kyoto commitment and Japan is a member of the alternative US-led Asia-Pacific partnership on Clean Development and Climate, backed by the US, Australia, Japan, China, India and South Korea.
Developing countries insist that any new pact against global warming must allow them the "flexibility" they need to keep their economies growing. Such "flexibility' is a code word for advocating no binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to be applied to them.
India has firmly rejected calls to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions but is pressing for greater collaboration on clean energy technologies. India's Environment Ministry says that to meet the demands of rising living standards and providing electricity to more than 500 million Indian people who go without, India's total emissions of greenhouse gases are bound to increase.
Developed countries that have signed Kyoto have made it clear that they will not agree to its extension beyond 2012 unless the US, China and India - which collectively produce more than half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - are included.
So a new agreement will have to be forged to take over from Kyoto in 2013 or before, and that is what all the talk was about at the G8 meeting in Germany in June. The European countries were looking for tougher and binding targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from 2013 onwards.
The US wants extended goals for reducing emissions - by about 2050 - and for no mandatory targets to be applied from 2013 but only "best efforts" requirements based on the application of new clean technologies.
Bush has made it clear that he opposes the cap-and-trade system at the heart of Kyoto and that the US will continue to reject that approach.
How this chasm between Europe and the US is going to be bridged remains very much in doubt. And without mandatory targets for greenhouse gas emissions cuts from 2013 onwards, will there be an international price of carbon and a continuing international market for carbon credits post-2012 or even from 2009?
* John Blakeley is a research fellow in the School of the Built Environment at Unitec in Auckland.
